Barefoot in the forest park

Sandy Mitchell sheds his shoes and finds food for the sole with a radical hiking group

Ramblers may be notorious for never venturing outside in anything but sensible shoes or stout boots, but one group of radical walkers is bent on breaking the mould. This lot gads about not just lightly shod but stark raving naked — from the ankle down, at any rate. Stand by for the Barefoot Hikers.

My invitation to join them came via an anonymous email that instructed me to show up without my shoes in a Forestry Commission car park at Symonds Yat on the Welsh Borders one brisk Sunday morning. So I stationed myself near the loos in shorts and bare feet as I'd been told, attracting threatening looks from passing walkers, until at last a pair of feet peeked nakedly from beneath a nearby hedge and strode towards me. Then came another and another, until 70 pink toes encircled my own.

'Finally, the cruel granite path gave way to a carpet of pine needles. It was like being stroked on the soles by a loving masseuse with the softest of loofahs'

I'll be frank. I had expected bare-footers to be real-life Hobbits — short, hairy types who were averse to normal human company — yet the half-dozen owners of these toes looked like mild, middle-aged men with tidy haircuts. But their bare feet did look very peculiar, as clean and buffed as the bonnets of showroom Rolls-Royces.

Colin Rennison, a slim and fit fellow with noticeably broad feet, introduced himself and explained the plan: This is a six-mile round trip through the forest. Walking barefoot will allow us to feel the textures and temperatures of the trail, and so add a whole new dimension to the experience. We'll all chat as we go along. It'll be a walking cocktail party, really," he promised cheerily as he strode away, not seeming to feel the slightest pain from the path of knife-edged granite chips, walking as easily if he were padding across a drawing room shag-pile towards a plate of canapés.

It turns out that the Barefoot Hikers is a small group of 20 or so regulars that gets together once a month to share the peculiar pleasure of marching with bare soles across raw earth in different corners of Britain. "We used to be called the Dirty Soles Society but we changed the name for fear of attracting the wrong sort," Rennison volunteered.

A small outfit maybe, but not alone in the world. Its larger sister in the United States claims thousands of supporters. "We hate wearing shoes and, if we had our way, would never wear them again," runs the manifesto on the website of the Society for Barefoot Living, based in California, which also pumps out alarming articles on walking barefoot in fresh snow or mowing the lawn without shoes. (How soon, I wonder, will we be reading a sequel on walking barefoot without toes?)

Neither do British barefooters shrink from challenges. They have braved limestone crags in Dovedale in Derbyshire and trampled Glastonbury's stickiest mud; they have even trodden the foul pavements of the capital itself. "London is an easy place to walk barefoot because there are so many strange people around that you don't stand out at all, especially on the Underground," says Rennison.

Barefooters will venture unshod into cinemas, restaurants and supermarkets. "Anywhere except places with big bouncers on the door," admitted one of the group who walked alongside me for a while as we forged up and down the steep hillsides that flank the sublime river Wye. "I have only once had serious trouble and that was in a shoe shop. It was near a beach and they wouldn't let me in even though I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and everyone else had bare chests or was in a bikini." Owners of shoe shops, it seems, are notorious for suspecting shoeless innocents of plotting to steal something.

Toeing the line: Sandy Mitchell (second from the right, top) and the Barefoot Hikers stride out in the Wye valley

Genuine, venomous hatred is reserved for a more unexpected target: the evil empire that is B&Q. If it is blatant black-hearted discrimination you want, what could be called "institutional shoe-ism", then you will find it here, in the warehouse, among the power-tools and planking.

"You go in to B&Q and people stare or make rude remarks. They are the sort of people who like wearing steel-capped work boots and they think there is something a bit un-macho about us," said of one of our fellow barefooters, in outraged tones.

By now we must have marched six or seven excruciating miles in a companionable silence, broken only by my own regular gasps of "aarh" and "urgh" as stones or roots rasped my tender toes. Then, finally, the cruel granite of the Forestry Commission path gave way to a cushioned carpet of pine needles and suddenly there came a blissful sensation, like being stroked on the soles by a loving masseuse with the softest of loofahs. Could there conceivably be something to this crazy barefoot lark, after all?

Almost back at the car park, our tireless group hit a soft mud track under the cool green canopy of some giant beech trees that harboured puddles filled with black ooze. We took turns to jump into them. While we were luxuriating in the wallow, a Sunday stroller — a woman dressed from head-to-toe in pristine whites — emerged from the forest. The barefooters' eyes zeroed in on her feet, shod in a pair of new Nike slip-ons, and it became deliciously clear as she came closer on the narrow path that (yes, yes, oh yes!) she was heading straight for one of the mud puddles. On and on she came until, right beside us, both her feet disappeared with a satisfying "glug" into the oily goo.

Barefooters are polite and diffident sorts who would never dream of mocking misfortune aloud but, as the poor woman pulled herself from the mud, they shot quick, sharp glances at each other. It was plain what they meant: "People who wear shoes, eh? What a very weird bunch they are."

The venues of forthcoming walks are published on the Barefoot Hikers website: www.renni.demon.co.uk/bfhike/bfhikers-main.htm. [This website no longer exists.]